The present invention relates generally to network and Internet search and interface systems and more particularly to search systems that provide enhanced search functionality including functions wherein search queries are automatically categorized according to one or more taxonomies and wherein taxonomies can be automatically generated from past queries and/or user actions in relation to the queries.
With the advent of the Internet and the multitude of web pages and media content available to a user over the World Wide Web (web), there has become a need to provide users with streamlined approaches to filter and obtain desired information from the web. Search systems and processes have been developed to meet the needs of users to obtain desired information. Examples of such technologies can be accessed through Yahoo!, Google and other sites. Typically, a user inputs a query and a search process returns one or more links (in the case of searching the web), documents and/or references (in the case of a different search corpus) related to the query. The links returned may be closely related, or they may be completely unrelated, to what the user was actually looking for. The “relatedness” of results to the query may be in part a function of the actual query entered as well as the robustness of the search system (underlying collection system) used. Relatedness might be subjectively determined by a user or objectively determined by what a user might have been looking for.
Taxonomies take time to update manually, but since they can be useful for searching large corpuses, automated methods of generating taxonomies for large corpuses would be useful.